Broadcast posts to Twitter and/or Facebook, pull in items from each as comments, and allow commenters to use their Twitter/Facebook identities.

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== Description ==

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Brought to you by [MailChimp](http://mailchimp.com/), [Social](http://mailchimp.com/social-plugin-for-wordpress/) is a lightweight plugin that handles a lot of the heavy lifting of making your blog seamlessly integrate with social networking sites [Twitter](http://twitter.com/) and [Facebook](http://facebook.com/).

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**Broadcast Published Posts**

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Through use of a proxy application, you can associate your Twitter and Facebook accounts with your blog and its users. Once you publish a new post, you can then choose to automatically broadcast a message to any accounts authenticated with the overall blog or your current logged-in user.

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- Automatically broadcast posts to Twitter and/or Facebook

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- Supports multiple accounts associated per user and per blog

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- Customize the broadcast message using tokens

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**Pull in Tweets and Replies as Comments**

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When publishing to Facebook and Twitter, the discussion is likely to continue there. Through Social, we can aggregate the various mentions, retweets, @replies, comments and responses and republish them as WordPress comments.

Many individuals use Facebook or Twitter as their primary identity(ies) on the web. Allow your commenters to log in and leave a comment as that identity. Furthermore, they can publish their response directly to their Twitter or Facebook account.

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- Allow users to leave comments as Facebook or Twitter identity

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- Twitter hovercard support (with @anywhere API key)

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- Links point back to users' Facebook or Twitter profiles

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- Indicators let you and visitors know people are who they say they are

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== Installation ==

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1. Upload `social` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory or install it from the Plugin uploader

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2. Activate the plugin through the `Plugins` menu in the WordPress administrator dashboard

Social was conceptualized and co-designed by the fine folks at [MailChimp](http://mailchimp.com "Email Marketing from MailChimp") led by [Aarron Walter](http://aarronwalter.com/). The application proxy is maintained and hosted by [MailChimp](http://mailchimp.com) and the plugin was co-designed and developed by [Crowd Favorite](http://crowdfavorite.com/ "Custom WordPress and web development").

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= How can I customize the comments form in my theme? =

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We recommend using CSS styles to selectively change the look and feel of your comments and comment form. The classes `social-comments-[no-comments|wordpress|twitter|facebook|pingbacks]` are available as as class names. More specific classes include:

- `.bypostauthor` - a class added to the comment thread to style comments from the author of the post

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The icons used for the plugin are currently 16x16 pixels, and reside in a vertical sprite with each icon at 100px intervals. Adhering to these intervals will ensure that icon positions will not need to change

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Note: we do not recommend making changes to the included plugin files as they may be overwritten during an upgrade.

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= Can I define a custom comments.php for Social? =

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Yes, if you'd rather create more 'advanced' customizations beyond CSS tweaks simply add the following line to your theme's `functions.php` file:

4. `SOCIAL_COMMENTS_JS` - JS file used on the comments form and WP-Admin

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To define custom JS/CSS in your theme's functions.php add the following line (Replace `SOCIAL_ADMIN_CSS` with one of the

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constants listed above):

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define('SOCIAL_ADMIN_CSS', STYLESHEETPATH.'/path/to/stylesheet.css');

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To disable Social's JS/CSS in your theme's functions.php add the following line (Replace `SOCIAL_ADMIN_CSS` With one of

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the constants defined above):

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define('SOCIAL_ADMIN_CSS', false);

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= Why are the tabs on my comment form not displaying correctly? =

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Chances are your theme is missing the `<?php wp_footer(); ?>` snippet in the footer.php.

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= How often are comments aggregated from Facebook and Twitter? =

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Once a post has been broadcasted to Facebook and/or Twitter Social will attempt to aggregate comments every 2, 4, 8, 12, 24, 48, and every 24 hours after the 48 hour mark after being broadcasted. If the post was broadcasted more than 48 hours ago, and there have been no replies through Facebook and/or Twitter then aggregation for that post will stop.

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These are performed using cron jobs noted below.

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= How are comments aggregated from Facebook and Twitter? =

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When the aggregation process runs Social uses the Facebook and Twitter search APIs to aggregate comments to the system.

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For Twitter, Social first searches for retweets and mentions of the broadcasted tweet using the following API calls: /statuses/retweets/:id, /statuses/mentions. Social then stores those IDs in a collection of aggregated comments. Social then hits Twitter's search API and uses the http://example.com?p=:id and the permalink generated by get_permalink($post_id) to search for tweets that contain a link to the blog post. Social then iterates over the search results and adds them to the collection, if the tweet does not already exist in the collection.

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For Facebook, Social first uses the Facebook search API to find any post that has the http://example.com?p=:id or the permalink generated by wp_get_permalink($post_id). These posts are then stored in a collection. Next, Social loads the comments for the broadcasted post by calling http://graph.facebook.com/:id/comments. Social then iterates over the search results and adds them to the collection, if the comment does not already exist in the collection.

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For both Facebook and Twitter, the final collection of tweets/comments are then added to the blog post as comments. The IDs of the tweets and comments are then stored to the database so when aggregation runs again the tweets and comments already aggregated are not duplicated.

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= What tweets will be seen by the Twitter search during aggregation? =

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Currently it seems Twitter will only return results using http://example.com/?p=:id and the permalink generated by get_permalink($post_id) if the full link is in the Tweet, or if the URL is minified using t.co URLs. Social can not guarantee that Tweets will be aggregated if any other URL shortening service is used.

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= What CRON jobs are built into Social? =

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Currently Social contains 2 CRON jobs:

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1. `cron_15`

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2. `cron_60`

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= How can I override Social's internal CRON service with system CRON jobs? =

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If you want to run system CRON jobs and disable Social's built in CRON jobs then do the following:

To utilize Twitter's @Anywhere functionality (hovercards appearing on linked @usernames) you will need to have an @Anywhere application set up. If you don't have an application already created,

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visit http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere.

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Once you have an Consumer API key, login to your WordPress installation and navigate to Settings -> Social -> Twitter @Anywhere Settings. Enter your `Consumer key` in the input box and click on "Save Settings".

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If you want to disable the @Anywhere functionality, simply remove the API key from the Social settings page and click "Save Settings".

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= Does the proxy application have access to my passwords now? =

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No, the proxy acts just like any Twitter or Facebook application. We've simply pass commands back and forth through this application so you don't have to set up your own.

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== Screenshots ==

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1. Allow your visitors to leave a comment as their Facebook or Twitter identities

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2. Social settings screen to connect accounts, set up default broadcast settings and more